Mars Sample Return 4
A speculative tale based on the history of the Viking Lander experiments and recent NASA plans
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3
Welcome back to Glass Half Full and thanks for reading! In today’s chapter of Mars Sample Return, Joan investigates the history of the possible discovery of life on Mars back in the 1970s.
Joan tried to forget about the Labeled Release Experiment and life on Mars as she went about her duties over the next several days. What was it to her? She was interested in life in other solar systems more than bacterial life on Mars. If the Panspermian Hypothesis was correct, then it wouldn’t even be that surprising. And she was just beginning what she hoped would be a long career at NASA. Who was she to question the work of the senior scientists in charge of studying Mars?
But since when wouldn’t a scientist want to confirm or disprove such a hypothesis? Either way, it would represent a large leap in human knowledge. So why the apparent resistance to finding out? That was the part that rankled, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
She just needed to keep her head down and do her work, not make any waves. She was well aware of the way scientists could circle the wagons when orthodoxy was challenged. Within her lifetime, it had happened to astrophysicist Avi Loeb when he claimed an intelligent origin for the extra-solar comet Oumuamua. It had happened over and over in the field of medicine, and especially nutritional health. The COVID crisis had revealed a lot of bad behavior on the part of scientists trying to protect the public from truths they supposedly couldn’t handle, or one group from the prejudices of another, or sometimes the scientists’ own asses from the consequences of their decisions. Had something like this happened to Levin and Straat?
As much as she tried to put these thoughts aside, Google and DuckDuckGo were right there at her fingertips. Even some government databases had managed to survive the purges, and she had ready access to them. One evening, sitting in her apartment, bored by the novel she was reading, she put the book down and picked up her phone. She keyed in “bacterial life on Mars” (she’d turned off her phone’s voice activation features long ago).
The first results were videos, as usual. Several were by a guy who called himself the Angry Astronaut. He had pieces about Gilbert Levin and the LR experiment, and even an interview with the scientist toward the end of his life. This YouTuber seemed like your average space enthusiast with no special expertise in exobiology. Then she found his videos on UFOs and decided to give his “content” a pass. She’d watched just enough to learn that both Levin and Straat had insisted on the accuracy of their results until their dying days. Levin had also warned that Mars samples should be quarantined in a space station or on the moon, not brought directly to Earth.
Then she came across a book titled Life on Mars, a detailed history of the Viking program with a heavy focus on Levin and Straat. The writer, a founder of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return, was so sympathetic to their cause that it was hard to tell if this was the full story. Still, it didn’t paint a great picture of science as practiced by NASA. Preconceptions, personalities, agendas, and ambitions seemed more important than rationality and logic. Levin himself seemed more like a gadfly than a scientist.
The basic story was simple. The two Viking landers both carried the same four experiments, including Levin’s Labeled Release. The LR experiment, and possibly one other, found results consistent with biology, while the two others did not. So overall, an inconclusive result. The confusing thing for Joan was that several of these experiments had been tried out in Antarctica before the mission, also with differing results. Sending experiments to Mars that produced such a variety of answers was only asking for trouble. If the same thing happened on the Red Planet, how would the biology team sort out the conflicting data? It seemed as if the mission was guaranteed to produce conflict and controversy even before it launched.
The fact that bacterial life had subsequently been found in many parts of Antarctica bolstered the LR experiment as the most accurate. The same with later discoveries that Mars hosts organic molecules (the absence of which cast doubt on the LR experiment.)
The best argument against the LR experiment seemed pretty convincing. Sure, bacterial life seemed to grow after one feeding of bacterial food. But then the soil was given an additional feeding and no additional CO2 came of it. This argued for the first round of growth being a chemical process that depleted its feed stock. If life were present, it should continue to grow on subsequent feedings.
But then Joan came across an article by an astrobiologist with an expertise in bacteria that managed to thrive in some of the driest places on Earth. He pointed out that the experiments might simply have fed the bacteria too much water, killing them. This could explain the initial growth followed by flat-lining in the LR experiment.
So the results of the Viking experiments were confusing and inconclusive. In most research areas, especially one as important as whether life exists on another planet, this state of affairs would prompt calls for more research (and funding). Even the leader of Viking’s biology team, Dr. Harold Klein, claimed in an old documentary that the results were inconclusive, not conclusive of no life on Mars. But in other statements, he claimed that the experiments had found “no evidence of life,” and this became the NASA consensus. In the coming years, the scientific community would behave as if current life had been ruled out. No subsequent expedition (other than a failed Russian attempt in the ‘90s) had even tried to search for extant life.
There was a simple explanation for this apparent lack of interest: funding. NASA’s budget had famously been cut after the initial splurge on the Apollo program. Probes to Mars needed to be sterilized, both to ensure they didn’t infect the Red Planet with Earth microbes and to be certain no Earth bacteria muddied experimental results. But there were different levels of sterilization. Any life-detection experiment would require the whole mission to have the higher, more expensive standard of cleaning. The book had several funny examples where Levin had tried to smuggle a life-detection experiment aboard a cheaper Mars mission while claiming it was for another purpose. His colleagues and the mission directors saw through these ruses and probably found him annoying.
But Life on Mars was sprinkled with anecdotes that showed other possible reasons for a hesitancy to study active biology on Earth’s neighbor. One was religion. Levin claimed that Dr. Philip H. Abelson, editor of Science magazine, had a religious bias against finding life anywhere apart from Earth. Levin claimed Abelson left one meeting with these parting words: “The Bible tells us there cannot be any life on other planets — this is a waste of time!” Later, Abelson’s Science rejected two of Levin and Straat’s papers about their Mars experiments. NASA administrators also expressed concerns about the reaction of religious fundamentalists if life was discovered elsewhere in the solar system, fearful that this could affect NASA’s funding.
Another hilarious and shocking story had the scientists in Viking’s mission control arguing over the color of the Martian sky as the first color photos came back. The original image on the monitors showed a blue sky, but the head of the mission ordered that the color on the monitors be shifted to turn it red. Then Levin and his son went around changing all the monitors back to blue (Levin’s interest being that the blue image also showed blotches of green on Martian rocks that could be algae). The director had them all turned back to red, and the controversy continued until Carl Sagan was forced to make a public statement on the matter.
Joan could only shake her head. Was this any way to conduct science?
She looked up the book’s author. He’d contributed an interview to a documentary that also talked about Martian pyramids. And he appeared to believe in the discredited theory that some Earth pathogens came here from space. So not a reliable source. And the most damning tales came directly from Levin, making it a one-sided take.
But the basic facts were verifiable through other sources. Amidst all the confusion about the Viking experiments, she came back to one conclusion: after more than half a century of studying the Red Planet, no one could say for certain whether life existed there or not. And after that initial attempt with Viking, little had been done to find out.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the consequences if the NASA consensus was wrong. What if Levin and Straat had been right, and Martian soil contained living bacteria? What would happen when astronauts eventually encountered those microbes? What would happen if those microbes were brought back to Earth, then escaped containment? As a scientist, she was used to dealing with uncertainty, but this was ridiculous.
She still didn’t have the full story. She needed to get NASA’s side. But who was still around from those days? Most of that generation had passed on.
The next morning, Joan cornered her boss, Marci, the chief archivist, in the break room. “Hey, Marci, I’m interested in some of the planetary missions from the ‘70s. Do you know if any old-timers from back then are still around?”
Marci took a sip from her coffee mug and set it down on the counter. “Which area?”
“Exobiology.”
“Ah, of course.” Her boss was giving her a quizzical look now. “All the principal engineers and investigators are long since gone.” Her brow furrowed. “Jacob McCartney might still be around. I knew him in the early 2000s. He started as an intern in the ‘70s. Last I heard, he was living over in Bethesda.”
“Great, thanks, I’ll look him up.” Joan returned to her cubicle and searched for McCartney’s number, hoping he could put her confusion to rest.
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Here’s Chapter 5.
Watch out, Joan! I’ve heard that curiosity killed the cat… great episode, Larry!